Progressive Lawyers under Siege: Moral Panic during the McCarthy Years

(Hardback)

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This is a study of a progressive law firm and its three partners. The firm was founded in 1936 and existed until the death of one partner in 1965.The partners were harassed by the FBI primarily for defending labor union members and leaders and the defense of both.The firms primary client was Harry Bridges, the long term President on the International Longshoremans and Warehousemans Union (ILWU). The irony was that the more the FBI persecuted labor unions, the more business the firm had from those harassed by the FBI. During this time the FBI was primarily interested in controlling the Communist Party. While the clients of the firm were sometimes Communists, the law partners were not Communist Party members. In both of these ways the FBI was wasting its time in persecuting this firm. Although the primary data used involved existing records (for example all of the partners had extensive FBI files), we also interviewed colleagues and relatives of the partners.

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Progressive Lawyers Under Siege recovers a long-hidden history of McCarthy era efforts by the FBI to investigate, harass, and intimidate progressive lawyers. Wark and Galliher take us inside the social and legal worlds of McCarthyism through a fine grained analysis of FBI files that targeted a high-profile progressive law firm in San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s. The authors paint a vivid picture of the anti-Semitic, anti-labor, and racially motivated efforts by the FBI to monitor and repress attorneys working on behalf of those fighting for economic and racial justice in an age of anti-Communist hysteria. Progressive Lawyers Under Siege, is no mere coda to history. In light of U.S. government efforts to penalize attorneys who represented suspected terrorists after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and subsequent revelations of widespread electronic surveillance of the U.S. population, this book offers a powerful cautionary tale about the lengths federal law enforcement will go to repress those who would provide legal counsel to people the government believes (often wrongly) to be enemies of the state. -- Raymond J. Michalowski, Northern Arizona University
It was the time of brave, principled lawyers who offered magnificent representation for isolated individuals against the massed resources of the state. For starters we only have to look at the determined defense of Owen Lattimore, "the #1 Soviet spy," according to the unlamented Sen. McCarthy by Thurman Arnold and Abe Fortas. This must-read book offers painful reminders of the failure of prominent lawyers against the abusers of our Rule of Law. -- Stanley Kutler

Author Bio

Colin Wark is associate professor of criminology and sociology at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. John F. Galliher is professor of sociology at Missouri University.